SURVIVE & THRIVE HEAVY CLUB WORKOUT CHALLENGE

 

on Tuesday, 03 September 2013. Posted in Conditioning Articles

You’re at the kitchen counter filling your plate full of the mouthwatering food that was made for dinner. The smell of home and the solace it provides washes over you with a much needed moment of reprieve. Laughter rings through the air from your loved ones, reminding you, amongst all the bombardment of a modern age, what is truly important. With a smile on your face and an uplifted heart you make your way to the table to join them. One second, you hold a vision of your life’s fulfillment, the next, it gets ripped away from you in the blink of an eye. Your worst nightmare, a magnitude 8.9 earthquake takes your legs out from under you, shorts out all sources of light, and turns the structure that is meant to make you feel secure into a death trap as it shatters around you like a house of cards.

When a natural disaster hits, how prepared are you? Not in terms of emergency supplies sitting in the closet, or having exit routes mapped out, but in terms of your body. You never know where you will be, what situation you will find yourself in, or the types and number of problems you will need to overcome. Are you capable of helping yourself, let alone anyone else you may need to?

After the monster earthquake that hit Japan in March of 2011, a group of fitness professionals from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines came together in a concerted effort to raise funds for relief. It was called "Pump Up Japan." It was a package of fitness programs that everyone contributed with 100% of all money raised being donated. With a substantial background in Clubbell training and the resources I provide to implement them, a program along those lines was the natural choice.

While I already had materials created that I could use, after going through footage of the earthquake, photos of the aftermath, and story upon story of those who had survived and those who had not, I was moved to create something specifically for this situation. A program for those who might find themselves in an earthquake to make them better equipped to survive what they will endure.

When faced with a situation in which your life is at stake, the trimmings, bells and whistles all disappear in a puff of smoke. Only what is absolutely essential is necessary. Time is no longer a luxury. Extra equipment is no longer an added bonus. Additional "work" only becomes excessive energy expenditure. Keeping in line with the reality faced when your life is in danger, stripping away the options I had to work with in creating the program became my foundation.

Thus the pieces to "Survive & Thrive: Earthquake" began being assembled.

SURVIVE & THRIVE: CLUBBELL WORKOUT REQUIREMENTS

• Can only utilize a single Clubbell
• Could not be longer than 20 minutes (but still include recovery, otherwise adaptation works to our detriment)
• Could only be a maximum combination of three Clubbell movements
• Must feel like a kick in the pants

With a limit of only three movements, selection was paramount. It needed to provide the biggest bang for the buck; and not just in terms of "how tough can I make this workout?" Relevancy to what would be faced during an earthquake took priority, but it needed to remain accessible. The ability to implement this workout is not limited to people with Clubbell training experience and the "athletically coordinated" by utilizing fancy, complicated combinations. This is a workout for the people, all the people.

One of the primary factors in an earthquake is having to stabilize and move your body as it relates to other objects. With everything being uprooted and shaken to the ground, you have incoming objects propelled from beside, above, and behind you while you are being thrown off balance. These objects will be moving at varying velocities and many will be too large or heavy to be manhandled. Instead, you need to develop the ability to efficiently move objects of mass by effectively manipulating your body with sound bio-mechanics around them.

If you are familiar with Olympic lifts (adopted and used with various equipment), an example is the Snatch or the Jerk. These movements use an explosive effort to cause acceleration of the weight in a given direction (in this case up), followed by the dropping of our body and locking of the arms to get underneath the weight, giving us a structural advantage to lift a weight that would otherwise be too heavy for us to get overhead. The only difference is that in an earthquake, you aren’t going to have a solid platform from which to explode, nor will the movement be straight up and down on a linear plane.

ENTER THE CLUBBELL.

With the weight being displaced towards the end, it creates an extreme leverage disadvantage. That leverage disadvantage pulls you off balance and requires that you fully engage the entire body.

• The awkwardness of trying to move a Clubbell encourages the adherence to proper structural alignment. It’s very difficult to "fake it," especially when it’s heavy, so maintaining that form isn’t just easier, it significantly reduces the risk of injury and gives you the foundation you need to get much more out of your workout.
• Because of its elongated design, we can move it around our body through greater ranges of motion than almost any other weighted tool out there, most closely resembling the dynamic movement you could potentially experience in an earthquake.
• The manipulation of the weight through dynamic ranges of motion trains selective tension which is very important for optimal shock absorption.
• Proficiency in directing and redirecting the Clubbell all around your body while you are "structurally engaged" helps to develop a relationship to the object and where it is in space. This skill development can be the difference between life and death when you don’t have the same reliance on the ground during an earthquake.

With the benefits that Clubbell training provides, I chose the movements and designed the "Survive & Thrive: Earthquake" program to address the initial seconds and minutes of the earthquake and the hours of the aftermath (both from a trapped and rescue perspective). I took into consideration the need for protection from overhead, the rotational and torsion forces you would experience in trying to right yourself while your equilibrium is knocked out, maneuvering under debris, optimal structural integration to endure for a longer period as a rescuer, and the necessity of having to move, carry or redirect objects (people) at an extreme leverage disadvantage. And yes, all with three straight-forward movements.

While listening to the theory and reasoning behind a program can assist in grasping what is being achieved, you will never truly understand until you feel it in your body; until you are fully engaged with your nervous system in an open "dialogue." So let’s open those lines of communication.

The following is a simple workout I put together using one of the movements, the 2-Handed Clubbell Flag Press, and sprints.

THE FLAG PRESS EXERCISE

• Stand in a neutral position - tall through the crown, shoulders down, core engaged, tailbone dropped, soft knees with feet approximately hip distance apart.
• Grip the Clubbell with two hands, one above the other and bring it to Order position – Clubbell in front of you, arms bent at 90 degrees, elbows tucked in to your side.
• From Order, press the Clubbell forward to Flag – shoulders packed down away from the ears, engaging the lats as you press the weight forward, turning your elbow pits to the sky as arms straighten out to parallel with the ground, elbows locked.
• Hold for a second, then return to Order before pressing back out to Flag.

Pick a Clubbell size that challenges you to get the full effect. For those who don’t own a Clubbell, you can find any sufficiently heavy item. For example, fill a box full of books. The protocol used is Tabata: 20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest. Complete 8 rounds for a total of 4 minutes.

THE PREPARATION

1. Place your Clubbell down on a flat surface.
2. Lightly jog away from it in a straight line for 10 seconds.
3. Once you hit 10 seconds, you have measured out your sprint distance. Place something down to mark it so you come back to the same spot every time.
4. Because of the explosiveness of sprinting, be sure to warm up thoroughly.

SURVIVE & THRIVE: CLUBBELL WORKOUT

1. Start your timer and sprint as FAST as you can to your Clubbell.
2. Lift Clubbell to Order and complete as many Flag Press’s as you can while maintaining proper technique and control. Keep pressing until the timer sounds the 20 second mark.
3. Clubbell down and lightly jog back to the start position, ready to sprint once the timer sounds the beginning of the next 20 seconds.
4. Repeat for 7 more rounds (alternate your grip on the Clubbell with each round).